2004 Melbury Cabernet Sauvignon

Full red-ruby. Sexy, inviting scents of plum, redcurrant, mocha, tobacco and dried flowers. Plush and sweet in the mouth, showing almost a truffley ripeness and the liqueur-like warmth of a sunny vintage. Can't match the 2005 for energy or floral lift but this wine is quite powerful and gripping on the back end, with its tannins still in need of some softening.

(14.5% alcohol): Brilliant full ruby. Sexy aromas of cassis, dark raspberry, iron, brown spices and mocha. Like liquid silk on the palate, offering a ripe truffley aspect but also showing excellent definition and well-integrated acidity. Still more to come here. Finishes very long and perfumed, with serious but suave tannins and lovely lift. Fills the mouth without leaving any impression of weight.

The 2004 Melbury comes from Pritchard Hill and is aged 22 months in 100% new French oak. (About 600-700 cases of each of these wines are produced.) The 2004 Melbury is showing even better than it was early on. It is very open-knit for a Bond wine at age ten and that’s a good thing, since we all want to drink these wines in our lifetime. This comes across as a Napa version of the famed Pauillac Pontet-Canet, with terrific licorice, cedarwood, blackberry, crème de cassis, toast, spice box and lead pencil notes in the aromatics and flavors of this drinkable, full-bodied, opulent wine that is strutting its stuff splendidly. It should drink well for another 15 or more years given its sensational richness and overall equilibrium. A brilliant project of Harlan Estates’ proprietor, Bill Harlan, these single-vineyard wines have been everything a Cabernet connoisseur could ever hope for since they were first released. Amazingly, these wines taste better with age than they did young, which is exactly what Harlan and his winemaking team of Bob Levy and consulting enologist Michel Rolland are trying to prove.